Based in San Antonio, Texas

The Mission

In San Antonio, Texas, all we have is our breakfast tacos and our Spurs.

When it comes to our Spurs, they’re doing just fine. Five championships. That Tim Duncan guy. Popovich. Five-0! The Ice Man. The culture. The rest of the NBA — the rest of sports, really — recognizes the Spurs’ greatness.

But when it comes to tacos made in San Antonio, specifically breakfast tacos, the rest of America isn’t on board. Sure, a New York writer will occasionally weigh in with an article that’s thinly researched and reported. Or, some Brooklyn hipster restaurant will begin serving $4 bean and cheese tacos and proclaim it a culinary renaissance or some shit. And EVERY SINGLE TIME, we San Antonians will get all indignant because after all these years we still have an inferiority complex the size of a Rolando’s Super Taco.

People, who cares?! We’re in this breakfast taco thing together — you and me. (Me being Ben Olivo, former downtown reporter, columnist and blogger at the San Antonio Express-News. If you want to know more about me — I don’t know why you would — go to the About page.)

And yet, we hardly know anything about breakfast tacos. I mean, we know we love them as a San Antonio culinary staple and we know individually which ones bring us the most joy, but do we know where they came from, the journey they took to get to this point in San Antonio’s history? We were born and they were there, in front of us on a paper plate in our abuelita’s kitchen.

Or like who serves the best breakfast tacos? Hundreds and hundreds of taquerias dot San Antonio, but has anybody tried to chronicle them all?

Hence, this blog. My goal is to find answers to these questions and many others that surround breakfast tacos in San Antonio.

Another goal is to explore the city, and not review the places that always make critics’ and readers’ choice lists: the Original Donut Shops and the Taco Havens and the Rolando’s of San Antonio — been there, done that. I want to find those taquerias and trucks that don’t get the press and acclaim — who don’t seek the press and acclaim — the backbone of San Antonio’s culinary culture.

There will be no rankings. I will, however, rate each taqueria, which you will find in list form here. This blog is a living thing. It’s meant to be methodical and deliberate. To take its time learning about breakfast tacos, and not just react in a huff every time Austin takes a dump.

Eventually, I’ll write beyond breakfast tacos to include other types of tacos (puffy, after all, was invented here, too), post interviews with cooks and restaurant owners, eventually visit the border, eventually visit Austin (to see what good if any they bring to the table that’s not kale), and explore various taco-related issues in essay form — God forbid another half-assed article about Austin is published.